


shining across this dark highway

by nocrimeinthearchive



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/F, Genderbending, Rule 63, Violence, genderbent, it wasn't meant to have angst but it got angsty, it wasn't meant to have violence but it got violent, it wasn't meant to namedrop robocop but that's just how it happens sometimes, robocop - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 11:00:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1602782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocrimeinthearchive/pseuds/nocrimeinthearchive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky has this dream: she is a child, and she is running, and somewhere there is Steve - and after that, it all gets a little blurry. (In which there is a series of vignettes of the daily life of two domestic superheroes, and in which there is a dream, and in which, for a brief shining moment, there is RoboCop.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	shining across this dark highway

One evening, as she lies along the length of the couch, Bucky says, “I had a weird dream last night,” and Steve makes a noise of non-committal encouragement from behind the television while she fiddles with cables.

“I was a kid,” Bucky says, swiping through their viewing options on the tablet. Tonight is one of their monthly designated Cultural Education Evenings, and the pickings are plentiful and difficult to separate.

“And I was in a forest, but it was near my house,” Bucky says, dithering between romance and action. Last month it was _Star Wars_ , but no-one had seen fit to let them know that someone got their hand replaced with a cybernetic implant in _Empire_ , which – as it turned out – is a sore spot to someone whose arm is a cybernetic implant installed by a degenerate fascist off-shoot in a project to turn them into a mindless super-soldier slash assassin.

After an explanatory phone call, Natasha had produced a list of red flag films. _RoboCop_ was listed four times, in increasingly larger handwriting.

 “Not here, I mean. Or our place as a kid. This was a different house, but it was definitely mine,” Bucky says, as Steve straightens up with a grunt. Bucky decides that she has heard too many references to ‘little friends’ and flicks _Scarface_ across to the screen, then holds her legs up so Steve can scooch underneath them onto the couch.

“But I was running through the forest, and I was definitely running _from_ something, but I was also definitely running _to_ something,” Bucky says, placing the tablet down on the floor and squirming to get her shoulders comfortable. Steve gives her shin an affectionate squeeze with one paw-like hand.

“And I’m not sure how, but you were in the house, but you were also back in the forest,” Bucky says, and her brow furrows slightly as she thinks about the dream again, trying to remember anything else that happened – but it was one dream, in the last hazy minutes before she woke up properly, and the details are already blurred together.

“Anyway, it was weird. I don’t know what the point was,” Bucky says, and the opening scene of the movie nudges her monologue into silence.

///

One morning, as she watches Steve meandering around the kitchen in her underwear, Bucky says, “I had that weird dream again last night,” and Steve makes a noise of curious interest as she prods a pancake into shape with a spatula.

“I was definitely running to you,” Bucky says, idly stirring her coffee. There’s nothing to stir in – no sugar, no milk – but Steve had left her spoon on the counter, and Bucky hadn’t even been paying attention when she picked it up and started fiddling with it.

“But I was absolutely, definitely running from something _involving_ you,” Bucky says, before reaching across the counter to put a plate in Steve’s out-stretched hand. Steve flips a pancake onto the plate, then levers the oven open with her foot and slides the plate in to keep warm. For a second, Bucky watches her girlfriend in silence, sipping her coffee.

“I think I wanted to warn you about something,” Bucky says, and lapses back into silence. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and half-heartedly browses the paper, but her mind is still set on the dream, digging into the cracks of what she can remember and trying to split it open.

There were the branches, snapping across her arms and legs, whipping back as she ran through the undergrowth. There was dirt, rocky dirt, with roots and twigs and sudden dips, and her bare heels had thudded against the ground as she panted and her throat ground out breaths into the cold, and through the last dozen yards she had seen:

“The house was there. I could see the house, this time. I couldn’t before,” Bucky says, tapping a finger on the paper.

“It was nighttime, or nearly nighttime. Dusk, I think, and the lights in the house were on, so I could see it through the trees at the edge of the forest, but behind it there was more forest – I think it was in a clearing. I know there was a road there. I didn’t see the road, but it was definitely there,” Bucky says, and the sentences are more staccato now as her mind runs through new bursts of information.

“And there was something in the forest, the one behind me. But it wasn’t chasing me. It was just in there. And I needed to get away from it,” Bucky says, and Steve gently places a full plate in front of her. Bucky gives her a quick smile, distracted but affectionate, and Steve smiles back.

“It wasn’t my house, though, this time,” Bucky says, pulling the bottle of syrup over.

“I don’t really know whose it was. It was just a house, and you were there,” Bucky says, pouring the syrup onto her pancakes and spreading it with her knife. Steve makes a vague noise of confirmation, of having heard what she has said and understanding that it was a sentence in the English language, and sets to work on her own breakfast.

///

One night, as she sits in bed and watches Steve wander through the bedroom and into the bathroom, Bucky says, “That weird dream showed up again,” and Steve pads back out to lean on the doorframe so she can listen to Bucky while she brushes her teeth.

“It definitely wasn’t my house, this time. I could see it, and it was definitely your house. You lived there, but it was _you_ you, adult you, even though I was a kid,” Bucky says, and Steve nods. Bucky looks into her girlfriend’s eyes, and what she sees is slight concern which is being inexpertly covered with a mask of casual interest. Bucky looks back down at her hands – at her mismatched nails, too long on one hand, uniform and utilitarian on the other.

“I wasn’t trying to warn you of anything, either,” Bucky says, picturing the house again: clapboard and timber shingles, with murky white walls that stand out against the dark bulk of the forest that reaches up behind it into the dusk sky. Light spills out of the windows, some gold and glowing from old lightbulbs, some white and stark from new ones, and as she pushes through the last few trees Bucky can make out the steps that lead up to the porch and the back screen door.

“I was trying to apologise for something,” Bucky says, and Steve holds up an apologetic finger before ducking back into the bathroom. To the sounds of Steve spitting and gargling, Bucky peels her shirt off and shuffles down under the covers, and as Steve comes back out she rolls onto her side.

“I don’t know what I was trying to apologise for - but you needed to hear it from me,” Bucky says. Steve slides into bed, and stretches out an arm, and Bucky adjusts herself so it fits under the crook of her neck. Resting along Steve’s body, she sighs.

“I wasn’t asleep, this time. I just… had the dream,” Bucky says, and, as Steve stiffens, resigns herself to returning to Sam’s support group and the stories of people who – and she checks herself for the uncharitable thought, even as it sneaks through – at least knew their own name when they went to war.

///

One afternoon, months later, Bucky sits in the passenger seat of Steve’s Chevelle and watches the pines slip past as the car crunches over the dirt.

Technically, it was Bucky’s idea to take a road trip, but her plan had been to branch further south and head through Nebraska, while at some point over the last couple of days Steve had decided that the forests of Minnesota were something she had to see in her lifetime. Bucky had pointed out that her lifetime was on track to last a healthy while; Steve had pointed out that shut up and find a cabin. Since Bucky had recently escaped assault charges because of Captain America’s good name, she had graciously acquiesced.

It is the middle of summer, and Bucky is wearing three layers on her upper body, with a shirt draped over her legs. Steve is wearing a singlet and shows no signs of wavering. Bucky is tempted to feel slightly less gracious, but her girlfriend does have shoulders like bridge pylons and arms like steel cables, and resentment can only take you so far in the face of that kind of thing.

Steve notices her staring and looks across quizzically – Bucky shrugs and smiles, squeezes her shoulder, then turns back to look out at the forest winding by.

The trees give way to a clearing. In the middle of the clearing, there is the cabin that Bucky had organised for them sight unseen, nestling among the trees that reach to the sky. Steve murmurs appreciatively and gives Bucky’s thigh a squeeze, and Bucky is pulled out of her distracted haze as quickly as she fell into it.

(The clapboard is familiar, and she has seen this forest before, somewhere – but it has been months of telling stories and listening to them, and the dream has faded from view.)

While Steve grabs the duffel bags from the back seat, Bucky opens the front door of the house and goes hunting for the promised wood stove.

///

One night, Bucky is running through the forest, and the devil is snapping at her heels.

The trees whip at her face and her hands and her arms and her legs, sharp and biting, with the branches scraping against her skin that already feels stunned and bare in the cold dusk. The girl's bare heels thud against the ground, snapping twigs underfoot, and even though her feet twist and roll over roots and stones her balance never fails.

Her breath comes in jags and claws out of her throat. Behind her is what she has done, and it looms invisible over the treetops, and she is running so maybe she can be far enough away to be see it all, to look back at it and take it in and say that for this, she is sorry.

Ahead of her is the clearing, and in the clearing is the house. She can see it through the last trees and the murky light. Silhouetted against the wall there is a car, a low black shadow, and Bucky shines through for a moment to worry but the girl's mind swamps back as she bursts out of the forest and onto the grass of the clearing.

A warm light shines on the porch and the girl runs up the steps and yanks back the wire screen door. She is ready to run up the stairs so she can look back at the forest but there is a scream - and she knows the scream, because she has made the scream, or will make the scream, and as she finds herself running around the stairs this moment of brief confusion is enough for Bucky to crack back through and try to drag herself out of the house, to claw herself out of the dream, because she knows that in this next room

Steve lies on a stretcher with cracked teeth and shattered bones, and over her stand men with truncheons, and there are electrodes taped to her head against the clotted stubble they left of her hair

because Bucky asked for it.

She begged for it.

They told her, We have Captain America. And we could do this to her, instead. We would prefer it, even. But we have you, and you are such a good subject. You are willing, aren't you? You want this honour, yes? You do not want it given to the Captain?

And as they beat her, the answer was yes, she was willing.

And they came to her later, and they told her, We still have Captain America. She is waiting. It would be faster, with her; she already has been transformed. It would be a matter of a quick shock - and Bucky screamed - and then the education. But you are selfish, yes? You want the honour?

Through the screams, Bucky said yes, she was selfish.

And it went like this, for years, or months, or an hour. There is a book that Bucky has forced herself to read, written just after the War, which describes the process: the waiting, the bursts of pain, the shame. And in the book, it says what happened next, after everything had been beaten out of her, after all she had left in her memory was two names.

They took her to a different room, and they said, This is the final step – and when they opened the door to bring her inside, Bucky looked through and screamed and begged, and as they dragged her away she was still praying to them to put Steve in her place.

And after that, for a long time, the names Bucky and Steve had been seared clean from her mind.

Bucky stands paralysed in the doorway, watching what she begged for, and the world roars.

///

One morning, propped up against the headboard, staring straight ahead at the wall of the cabin bedroom, Bucky says, “I had that dream again,” and she feels Steve’s head jerk up in her lap.

Bucky gently presses Steve’s head back down, knotting her fingers up inside her girlfriend’s hair, and keeps talking.

///

One morning, Bucky wanders into the kitchen, and Steve looks over her shoulder from the stovetop and says, “I got you a present, hun,” and waves a hand at an envelope on the counter.

Inside, there is a card.

The card says, “As penance for unnamed sins, I, Jane Barnes, do hereby promise to stand in for Stephanie Rogers at a media event of her choosing and, in so doing, will accept the debt as cleared in perpetuity.”

Steve says, “There’s a pen on the table. Sign it.”

Steve grins.

Bucky glares.

**Author's Note:**

> (thanks, bruce springsteen)


End file.
